The Book of Collins Prayer

People, this is awesome. Have you seen this week’s New Yorker?

You all know Mr. Collins’s proposal. I know you do.

Turns out we—or I, at the very least—have been missing a whole joke all this time. Sure, it’s a super weird proposal. Sure, Mr. Collins’s priorities seem…unusual. But guess what? There’s a whole other layer of humor there, and it’s ALL BECAUSE OF THE ANGLICANS!

It all starts on page 76, toward the end of a review—if you can call it that—in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer. (You know, as you do.)

Says the critic James Wood, “Every reader notes that the pompous parson neglects to mention love or even the happiness of the woman he wants to marry; every reader notes the sly vaudeville whereby Austen makes us think that Mr. Collins’s third reason for matrimony will be his most important (‘which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier’), only to have him announce that his third reason is the approval of his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. But how many readers note that this classic comedy is really a joke, from an Anglican vicar’s daughter, about the order of the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer?”

He’s totally right. He goes on to compare the substance and order of Mr. Collins’s talking points (1. A clergyman should set the example of marriage; 2. Marriage would make me happy; 3. THIS marriage would make Lady Catherine happy) with those of the church’s (1. The procreation of children; 2. Remedy against sin [apparently]; 3. Mutual society, help, and comfort—the “I GUESS” being heavily implied). “Thomas Cranmer’s words live on in Jane Austen’s,” says Wood, “even if not in the form he would have desired.”

Leave it to Jane to make Mr. Collins’s decision to speak, ever, into a double-decker joke AND a social statement; leave it to Jane to make a continually relevant joke out of a text that was antique even at the time; leave it to Jane to hit a little close to home for her own time and place. It never gets old, does it?

It’s all right, Cranmer. It could have happened to anybody.